


Cat & Wolf

by bruxabait



Category: Wiedźmin | The Witcher (Video Game)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Fluff and Angst, Friends to Lovers, Lambert Swears (The Witcher), Light Angst, M/M, Mentioned Eskel (The Witcher), Mentioned Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia, Mentioned Vesemir (The Witcher), Minor Injuries, Pre-The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, This Is STUPID, Witchers Have Feelings (The Witcher), and aiden is too honestly, bon appetit lamaiden whores, i went off on so many tangents please forgive me, lambert is an idiot, no smut we pine in this household, purely self-indulgent because i love these two, that dumb 'and there was only one bed' trope because why the fuck not, witcher crack
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-23
Updated: 2020-09-23
Packaged: 2021-03-07 16:00:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,677
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26620294
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bruxabait/pseuds/bruxabait
Summary: While clearing a lakeshore in Velen of drowners, Aiden gets his shit absolutely rocked. By a drowner. Literally one of the easiest monsters for witchers to kill. Don't ask me how. Lambert acts pissy about it but he's really just concerned.
Relationships: Aiden/Lambert (The Witcher)
Comments: 4
Kudos: 55





	Cat & Wolf

**Author's Note:**

> what can i say about this... it took me way too long to finish, it's a complete mess, but i actually sort of like it? i humbly offer you this pile of on-fire garbage.

Lambert wiped a hand across the front of his gambeson. The studded black leather was coated in foul, oily monster blood. The smell of it alone made him thankful that his hands were gloved. Above all the other hazards of his profession, Lambert particularly loathed the way a monster’s stench could linger on its hunter’s clothes and skin.

He made a sound of outraged disgust, shaking the wretched ichor from his glove. It splattered in droplets of congealing garnet onto the sand of a breezy lakeshore in Velen, upon which a horde of drowners had assailed he and Aiden. Judging by the contents of their stomachs, now splayed across dusty banks, the two witchers would have been their second meal in the span of a few days. Gristly bits of what had once, perhaps, been a dead horse or rotting deer carcass, lay whole and mostly undigested among the gore.

“Ah, there’s that famed petulance of yours again.” Aiden jeered as he picked his way through a myriad of stinking drowner entrails and the gruesome concoction of stomach acid and pieces of a rather uninviting drowner snack.

“Don’t start, Aiden.”

The Cat School witcher raised both hands in a gesture of feigned surrender, dipping his head and glancing at Lambert through a veil of dark lashes. The beginning of that smug grin that Lambert couldn’t stand had started to lift the corners of his mouth. He hummed, the sound made predominantly to prevent Lambert from carrying things on, as he had a tendency to do.

Lambert leant over to wrench his silver sword free from the body of the last monster he had felled. The force of his swing had guided its blade almost clean through its midsection. Its torso was half-severed from the rest of it, the halves connected only by a gleaming bit of spine, in which the edge of his sword had been embedded. Any ordinary blade’s edge would surely have rolled over itself in a troublesome fold — but a witcher’s blade carried no such risk. The meteoric iron of its core held true against even the harshest blows, and a coating of silver ensured that it was capable of cleaving through any monster’s flesh without issue.

With a final tug it dislodged from cracked bone with a wet, nauseating _crunch._

Neither man was bothered by it.

Lambert fished a stained scrap of fabric from his pocket and ran it swiftly along the length of his blade to eradicate any odorous remnants of drowner blood. It came away saturated with the rapidly darkening substance, thick and viscid now that it had been left against the silver a few minutes. The blade sang in a low hum as his slid it back into its sheath, slung across his back.

“White Orchard is still a day’s ride away, Lam. We’re better off setting up camp for the night.”

“Fine. But we’re leaving at first light. We both smell like shit.”

Aiden put up no argument. Lambert took his silence for agreement, and was satisfied.

Any hope he had once had for a quiet ride along the lakeshore on the way to the inn at White Orchard was more or less dashed. It was all Lambert could do to quell the rise of dreadful embarrassment in his chest. It had been _his_ idea to venture off the road. He had thought that cutting over the strip of pale gold sand would spare them harassment by Nilfgaardian patrolmen and make for a more scenic route. The landscape of Velen as a whole had become a patchwork of battlefields and reeking marshland. Any beauty that had dwelt there had been well and truly stomped out, for good. Corpses swung in gentle breezes rolling off the contaminated flow of the Ismena. Carrion birds perched upon their rotting heads, flesh sloughing away to leave bone exposed. Their eyes had been pecked and torn at until naught remained but empty, bloodied sockets through which the occasional pale-pink glimpse of brain tissue could be seen.

Lambert had grown sick of looking at those terror-frozen faces, tired of riding beneath branches displaying the grim marks of Nilfgaardian occupation. As a witcher, even one younger than most, Lambert had witnessed a healthy number of horrors. At times he thought it best to spare himself from ones that were none of his concern to begin with.

This shortcut, this little diversion, had been meant to lighten the mood. A slow ride by moonlight, beneath an all-encompassing filigree of stars? To Lambert it had sounded like a step up from a midnight stroll through a garden of Temerian corpses. But, as usual, he had fucked up _royally._

“So much for our romantic boat ride, huh?” He quipped, and raised two fingers to his lips to whistle for the horses. Their mounts had both run off during the fray. The miniature sandstorm kicked up by their flight was still settling in a haze of gold.

Aiden’s only reply was a strained half-chuckle as he leant against a boulder jutting up from the shore and reaching just above his waist. Lambert turned to ask him about the stick that had apparently made its way up his ass, but the snide question withered before it had a chance to leave his lips.

The Feline witcher’s hand was pressed firmly to his side, just beneath his ribs.

Blood soaked the fabric of his jacket, dripping in steady rivulets of blackish crimson from between his fingers. The red sash secured around his waist over a wide belt was dark and saturated with it. In a moment of panicked discomposure, Lambert thought how strange it was, the difference between _red_ and _blood._ They were not at all the same thing.

Red was the colour of passion, the colour of power, of victory. It danced on the rippling pennants of kings, it burned like embers in the eyes of the girls in every half-decent brothel on the Continent. It adorned the chests of the Temple Guard in Novigrad, who, contrary to Lambert’s own opinion, believed themselves to be virtuous and right.

Blood was something else entirely.

It was the blackened earth after a battle. It was the fire kindled by soldiers that consumed entire villages at night while peasants slept. It was the gore that streaked the faces of children orphaned by war. There was no power in it, no passion, not even fury. There was only hurt. There was only fear. Nothing more.

It took a lot to kill a witcher, but Aiden’s knees were wobbling out from beneath him, and his face was pale, sweat beading at his temple as though he were feverish. He tipped back his head and downed a bottle of White Raffard’s Decoction, restoring a bit of colour to his skin. But no elixir was capable of sealing the gaping red laceration running on a slight diagonal down his side. It would merely allow him to ignore the pain he was in for a while.

“Fuck, Aiden…” Lambert cursed. There was no venom in his voice, at least no venom meant for Aiden. Only cold, terrified concern that had had his heartbeat crawling arduously up his throat.

The dread that had cemented Lambert’s bones in place for a moment was finally contained, pooling like frigid water in his lungs. He had shut out the tide of it which churned patiently all around him, pressing against his mouth and nose like a smothering hand. It knew as well as him that he would eventually have no other choice than to take a breath.

It was patient.

It could wait.

And when at last he inhaled, that icy deluge would flood in again. It would bubble past his lips and into his veins, frosting over his blood and bringing winter to the mutagen-blighted landscape of his body. It would whisper things. The voice of the cold ocean was hollow, and rung like echoing silver bells through his head, always deafeningly loud but never clear.

Lambert knew only because he had heard it before.

It had been less frequent prior to befriending Aiden. In his childhood he had only heard it a handful of times. Vesemir had been cross with him. Geralt had nearly fallen while they had been running the parapets. A foglet had leapt out at him from nowhere in the mountain pass, the very first time he went out on the Path.

Now it seemed that the cold ocean was only ever one misstep away, one well-aimed slash of a drowner’s claws.

_Too close, it nearly got him that time._

_Aiden’s horse is gone and the sun is barely up._

_Will today be the day I lose him?_

It was ridiculous, the number of irritating little fears that itched at the back of his mind. Aiden was a witcher, and a fairly experienced one. He knew how to take care of himself, and he had undergone the same mutations all witchers did. He was not a helpless little boy, waving a pair of swords about in play. And Lambert _knew_ that. He had seen Aiden become little more than a blur of frenzied movement and sparking silver too many times to recall. He had seen monsters and men and creatures who were a little of both fall to Aiden’s blades, and he had seen the other witcher emerge without so much as a scratch to show for it.

And yet each time the overconfident bastard suffered even a minor wound, Lambert’s heart almost fucking stopped.

“Why the hell didn’t you say anything sooner?” He asked, exerting a great deal of willpower to keep his tone free of chastisement. He moved to slip Aiden’s arm over his shoulder and whistled for the horses again.

“Because you make a big huff of things, Lam.”

“I’ll make as big a fucking huff as I want if you’re bleeding through your clothes, idiot.”

Aiden grit his teeth as Lambert helped him up into the saddle. He cursed vibrantly, slumped over the warm neck of his chestnut warmblood. The flow of crimson seeping through his shirt had become sluggish thanks to the pressure he was keeping on it, but he had still lost a good amount of blood.

Lambert wanted to get that cut cleaned and sutured as quickly as they could manage. Most skilled surgeons and medics were aiding in the Temerian resistance against Nilfgaard, and White Orchard had never been an epicentre of professional medicine to begin with, so his limited experience would have to suffice in terms of treatment. Even on the off chance that a citizen of White Orchard was a practiced medic, they surely would not come forward to lend help to a pair of witchers.

They were on their own, as their kind so often was.

That would have to be enough.

The road to White Orchard, although the village lay only an hour’s ride from the lakeshore, was bumpy to say the least.

Aiden dutifully kept up pressure on the laceration, if only because Lambert reminded him every few minutes. But as the effects of White Raffard’s wore off, the pain of his predicament made riding something of a challenge. Each time he was jostled, Lambert could hear him draw another hissing breath between his teeth, saw his head loll forward slightly before he had the chance to right himself, force his fluttering eyelids open again. It became clear that his body wanted to cease being conscious, to grant him the relief of no longer feeling what terrible pain he was in.

But witchers, however more sturdy than humans they were proven to be, could still _die_ like humans.

Lambert leant so far over in his saddle to prop Aiden up with his hand that he felt for a moment as though he might tip over just as helplessly. His eyes, glowing a burnished, molten amber, were cast almost frantically to the road between his destrier’s pricked ears.

The lights of White Orchard were visible, over perhaps a mile of tilled land. The road, however, veered outwards to circle around overturned earth at a respectful distance. Between Aiden and a warm room and clean bandages and hot water, some idiot farmer had sown an entire field’s worth of fucking snow peas.

Lambert cursed, reining in his horse. Aiden, reeling dizzily in the saddle, did the same.

“Lam?” His voice was slurred, as though his tongue were made of cotton, but inappropriately cheery.

Lambert’s jaw tensed, a muscle pulling taut with a surge in his temper. Aidan was doing it again; donning this childish act that no one with half a brain would ever believe. He could never just let himself hurt. That was the one thing that Lambert couldn’t stand about him. His voice was always at its sweetest when he was talking through a mouthful of blood.

“We’re cutting through.” He gave the bunched reins that bit into his palm a decisive tug, jerking his horse’s head around toward the field and nudging the animal’s flanks to spur it on, between two impossibly straight columns of pea plants. Their delicate offshoots spiralled up along wooden dowels driven into the soil, drooping back down beneath their own weight at the tops, where they ran out of support and thus elected, by some instinct, to delve back the way they had come from.

“We can’t go this way, there are—”

“You don’t get a say.”

The Cat School witcher heaved a rather impressive sigh, which ended in a rattling cough tinged bright crimson. His mount kept up a brisk pace, diving through a labyrinth of snow pea plants a few steps behind Lambert’s imposing warhorse. Grasping leaves of a healthy but soft green ran their curling edges, wet with dew, along her sweat-damp sides. The breath of their horses fogged as it puffed from their flared nostrils.

The nearer they got to White Orchard, the more convinced Lambert became that their arrival landed on the evening of some obscure festival night exclusive to the people of Velen. From the inn at the crossroads, lively music drifted out to play among the thatch-roofed huts and the freshly turned earth of the fields. Light peeked at the edges of the inn’s threshold, door ajar as though to invite weary travellers in. The sweet, slightly heady scent of apple brandy and the bitter tinge of Temerian rye beneath it was much the same as the aroma that seemed to linger in every inn from here to the Pontar. The Path was long and winding, with a tendency to double back on itself now and again. At one point or another, every wine-soaked tavern they visited and every quaint little inn with spiders in the rafters and rats in the larder began to blur together and look the same.

Lambert dismounted first, knotting his mare’s reins around a hitching post tightly. Aiden, still astride his saddle and looking troublingly pale, flicked his own reins over the pricked ears of his horse. Lambert caught them, but vexation was etched across his features in the place of his usual smug expression. Gloating about his quick reflexes was uncharacteristically far from his mind at the moment. He extended a hand to Aiden, his palm pressed against the other witcher’s arm as he slid down from the saddle, landing heavily on the scuffed soles of his boots. He’d lost too much blood and ridden for too long to maintain the usual lightness of his movements. Fatigue and the intolerable, nagging pain were catching up to him.

It was admirable how long he had managed to stay conscious and relatively good spirits, but it was evident that both his energy and the quality of his mood were ebbing.

A short, round woman in a red frock hurried to greet them as they entered the inn at the crossroads. A plain white apron stained and patched in several places was tied about her waist, and her cheeks were ruddy from laughing and dancing. It wasn’t often that the people of Velen could be found looking so alive. Lambert had found that most times they were worn and sour-faced, grey and dour as corpses.

“Ye’ve come t’us in need of board, have ye?” Her voice still held the fluttering ghost of her previous mirth, skillfully repressed as she conducted business.

“Yeah,” Lambert said, adjusting his footing to better support Aiden, who had begun to droop and lean against his side. “Just a room. Quickly, if you can.”

The woman’s creased features were split by a broad smile, the crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes deepening. “We’ve only a single, or a split sleeping arrangement, if ye please, and my cook has got—“

“Any room, any one at all, just— Lambert, pay her, for fuck’s sake.” Aiden cut in, his tone carrying an edge that Lambert didn’t like, but decided not to mention. He was not fond of being told what to do, and Aiden knew it. But he was also fairly sure that Aiden would bite his head off without a second thought if he did anything to agitate him tonight.

That wasn’t about to stop him.

He reached down to fish a few Orens from the purse at Aiden’s belt, a smirk curling at the edge of his mouth as the Cat School witcher rolled his eyes so extravagantly that Lambert was certain it must have given him a headache. Counting them quickly, he passed them across the bar-top and the woman snatched them up with near-startling speed, as though she were afraid that someone else would reach for them.

“Room’s upstairs at the end of the hall.”

Her pleasant demeanour had dissolved completely. _Just as soon as she was paid,_ Lambert thought with a twinge of bitter annoyance. The kindness of common folk was extended to witchers only until they had what they were after. After they had received their coin, after their children were safely returned to them, after the thing they were all afraid of was dealt with, any semblance of civility dropped away, replaced by dirty looks cast over shoulders and cool indifference.

Neither one of them thanked her.

Beneath their feet the stairs whined, steps leaning different ways, sloping at odd angles as a result of age and poor construction. No Man’s Land was wet for most of the year, and water crept into the foundations of its buildings, into the earth upon which it all stood. Floors rippled and tilted and became uneven, walls buckled, made heavy with mildew, houses and keeps leant and shifted, as though a god with a cruel sense of humour had plunged a massive hand into the dirt and uprooted them all. The whole damn province was soaked and mouldering and miserable, but the services of witchers were in high demand. In most ways Velen was a war-torn wasteland, a place no longer fit to support its population, a place which grew more dangerous with each passing year. But to monsters? It was idyllic. Plenty of places to hide among the marshes, no shortage of corpses to feed on and hopeless little villages to prey upon.

It was common knowledge among witchers that if ever they found themselves out of work in the other provinces, Velen would provide.

That was what had brought them here. When they had taken their fill of contracts in Novigrad, they had decided to travel south instead, and seek work in Velen. It had been a decision they made on Lambert’s suggestion. He had wanted to make their way through Velen before turning their attention northward to winter at Kaer Morhen.

It was because of him that they were in Velen to begin with.

If he had been watching Aiden’s back, this never would have happened.

If he had been a good partner instead of assuming that Aiden would be fine without his help…

Guilt rose like bile in Lambert’s throat, acrid and choking. He had watched Aiden’s confidence and grace with a sword in his hand so many times that he forgot how easy it was to slip up, and how deadly a minor mistake could prove. A wrong step could cost a witcher his life. A slow reaction, a missed detail, a breath just a little too loud. All of those things could be death sentences. _And Lambert had forgotten._ He had been so sure that nothing could touch Aiden, because believing anything else was too frightening to consider.

Their room at the inn at the crossroads was small, and dark aside from a low fire burning in a stone hearth. Its embers crackled and puffed sparks, glowing the orange-red of hot steel. Lambert was powerfully reminded of the stories Vesemir told. He described dragons in such vivid detail that Lambert sometimes wondered whether he had seen one himself. The way their throats spewed dancing sparks and put forth dull red light the way burning coals did. How the skin of the beast’s underbelly stretched itself thin, almost membraneous, before it set loose a breath of cloying flames that stank like burnt entrails and how dragon fire reached temperatures far higher than those of any normal blaze.

But this was only a hearth, Lambert reminded himself. To think of it any other way was foolish, and to remember Vesemir’s regaling tales of monsters he had never killed was fucking ridiculous. Of course the old man had never met a dragon — he had probably been quoting directly from the bestiary.

“Care to come back from your daydreaming and help me?”

Aiden’s voice shattered the thoughts that Lambert had become entrenched in. His tone was affable enough, but Lambert could hear strain in it. Aiden’s patience was on its last legs, and Lambert elected not to contest anything the Cat School witcher requested of him for the time being. He liked being alive. Most of the time.

“Yeah, I can do that.”

Aiden only grunted in reply, his palm still sticky with drying blood as he pressed it against his torso, leaning over to rummage through the contents of his saddlebags, now draped across the back of a crooked little chair. He tossed items onto the neatly folded quilt at the edge of the bed as he found them: a bone needle, a half-used spool of thin hemp thread, a little flask of particularly strong spirit, and several strips of clean fabric. It would have to do, and with any luck the right tools would make up for Lambert’s lack of skill in treating wounds.

He set his hand on Aiden’s shoulder, finding his skin hot and damp, as though he were fevered or labouring to keep himself from losing consciousness. Swallowing the cold ocean of festering dread once more, he encouraged Aiden to sit down at the edge of the bed before settling beside him. Aiden worked at the hooks of his jacket, peeling the studded leather garment away from his body. Its hem dripped tiny, perfect scarlet circles onto the wood floor, where he tossed it down. Lambert’s fingertips brushed beneath the edge of Aiden’s shirt, deftly avoiding the jagged-edged stain spreading across the fabric. It had gotten worse since the lakeshore.

“Fucking hell, Aiden,” He said, his voice hardly above a whisper. “this looks worse than before.”

“I bled the whole way here, Lam. What were you expecting, exactly?”

“I was hoping the pressure would be enough to…” He trailed off, neglecting to finish his sentence as he lifted Aiden’s shirt up over his head, the fresh stain leaving streaks of tacky crimson against his skin where the soaked fabric touched him. Lambert stood for a moment, moving to the shallow basin of water on the table across the room and tearing a piece of clean fabric from Aiden’s ruined article of clothing.

“Hey! That was my favourite shirt, Lambert.” Aiden protested from the edge of the bed.

“Don’t whine. We were going to have to buy you a new one anyway.”

Lambert soaked the rag in cool water from the basin, wringing it out before turning on his heel and walking back across the room to Aiden, settling at the edge of the bed atop the scratchy woven blanket with him. He studied the wide gash in his partner’s side for a moment without moving to touch him. It was perhaps as long as his hand from wrist to fingertips, following the curve of Aiden’s ribcage and running parallel to the exposed waistband of his trousers. His skin looked red and inflamed, and blood had made its way in rivulets down his side, leaving behind the impressions of dark rivers meandering around the slightly raised remnants of old injuries, shining and silvery in the shifting light of the fire.

Lambert found his attention straying from the task ahead of him. His eyes traced along the paths of those old scars. He knew the stories of all the ones that were visible while Aiden was fully dressed: The ragged trail of a cut that ran across the bridge of his nose, from when a fight in a tavern with a one-time associate led to a bottle being smashed in his face. He’d never mentioned what happened after that, but Lambert couldn’t imagine that business relationship lasting much longer. The small burn mark on the back of his right palm was the result of a brush with a particularly aggressive basilisk specimen in Toussaint. But he had never been told about the ones that hardly anyone but Aiden ever saw.

He swallowed the fervent questions bubbling up in his chest, drew back the hand not holding his makeshift washcloth (which had drawn perilously close to Aiden’s skin), and noticed for the first time that the Feline witcher was looking at him. Not with one brow cocked and his arms folded sternly across his chest, as he usually looked at Lambert when he was annoyed. Only watching, unusually focused and deathly quiet, as though waiting to see what Lambert would do next.

With heat rising rapidly to his face, Lambert darted his eyes away and finally set to work cleaning the half-dry blood from Aiden’s skin, not quite as delicately as he should have been. He heard Aiden breathe out through his nostrils, a sound bordering on a laugh which he chose to ignore, schooling his mouth into a hard line as he worked quietly.

The blood came away easily enough, leaving a faint pinkish tinge behind, and Lambert doused the rag he held in spirit. He’d seen Vesemir use alcohol to clean cuts a few times, and each time been forced to endure a long-winded lecture on the importance of disinfecting a wound before bandaging it, and how failing to do so could cause an injury to fester and become infected. And yet all Eskel or Geralt ever got was a polite, concise reminder. Like always.

He ran the cloth over Aiden’s side as gently as he could, pressing it down and holding it still for a few seconds before setting it down. Next came the part he had the most trouble with, and the part that Aiden hated the most. He’d been quiet while Lambert cleaned his wound, but now he seemed abruptly fidgety at the prospect of having to sit through another set of stitches, during which he had to stay still for some time while Lambert sniped at him for moving too much.

Conversation was the only thing that made it bearable. Conversation with _Lambert_ made it almost pleasant, when they were talking and not bickering.

“You can ask me if you’d like to, Lam.” He said, certain that Lambert would know what he referred to.

For some time Lambert did not reply, his efforts entirely dedicated to threading the slender needle he held between his thumb and middle finger, tying a somewhat bulky knot at the end before leaning downward to better see what he was doing. He completed the first stitch and allowed himself to take a step back from the intense focus he had been exerting for the past several minutes, now that the most difficult part was done with.

Lambert glanced up from his cautious needlework to meet Aiden’s eyes, glowing a shade of amber so light it more closely resembled honey.

He hesitated, only for a moment, as he drew the needle slowly back, pulling another stitch taut.

“Alright,” He said, gesturing vaguely to a slightly raised and roughly healed scar which carved a thin crescent into Aiden’s right shoulder, the same side as where Lambert sat. “how about this one?”

It wasn’t especially large, but it stretched from just below his collarbone and ended several inches down his back, and Lambert found its position fascinating. He thought that perhaps whatever inflicted it had struck from above.

“That one…” Aiden began, his voice taking on the soft edge it always did when he was preparing to tell a story. Quiet, almost drawling, and frustratingly slow, drawing out his tale as much as was possible to hold the attention of his audience. Lambert knew not to complain, lest Aiden clam up and cease his storytelling.

“That one has an interesting story to it…”

Lambert smiled with one side of his mouth, so subtle that he was certain Aiden couldn’t possible notice.

“Does it?”

“Yes, it does. I was in Novigrad, ten years ago. Well, actually, I was between Novigrad and Carsten, where I’d heard tell of one of those contracts we Cat School boys sometimes take on, when they pay well.”

“A contract on a human?”

Lambert had asked him about those, once — whether he had ever taken one, or if that was only a rumour told by the other witcher schools. Apparently in his more reckless years Aiden had earned the bulk of his coin by settling the disputes and satisfying the vendettas of humans with steel. He had not taken a contract such as that since he and Lambert began travelling the Continent together. Whether it was for a lack of them or because of a recent ethical epiphany, Lambert wasn’t sure.

“Yes, that’s the kind. If memory serves this contract was issued by a nobleman, on another nobleman, for the apparent theft of a family heirloom. A dagger that the contract’s issuer thought this man had smuggled out of his home after an evening of drinking. The dagger was supposed to be dull. Hadn’t been sharpened in decades, since it no longer had a purpose aside from decoration—”

“So a piss-drunk rich guy decided to steal a dusty old knife? And somehow that’s worth having him murdered?”

“If someone stole your swords, wouldn’t you be a little offended?”

“I guess… Go on.”

“May I?”

“Fuck you.”

Aiden laughed, the sound drifting up toward the rafters, where warm air and weak curls of smoke from the candle on the table mingled. Lambert tensed, his body quite suddenly seizing up in order to quell the tide of affection that had risen calmly and steadily, threatening to close over his head before he could stop it rising. The cold waters of his earlier terror had receded now that Aiden was safe, leaving only the usual battle that Lambert waged, against his very nature. Against the inexplicable hold that Aiden had over him. The way his chest constricted when Aiden smiled at something he’d said, and the dizziness induced by an unintentional brush of their hands or a bumped shoulder.

And it was a losing battle.

“Anyway, the contract’s issuer, the rich guy who had his family’s dagger stolen from him, had neglected to tell me what this dagger looked like. And when I arrived at the estate of the thief, he was wearing a dagger at his hip. Old, engraved, inlaid with jewels, the usual when it comes to decorative knives. But he assured me that this dagger had been in his family for four generations, and made a show of being extremely offended that I would ever accuse him of stealing from his friend…”

Lambert rolled his eyes as he completed his last stitch, and tied the thread in a tight knot, and snapped it.

“Only in fucking Novigrad…” He sighed with a shake of his head.

“Are you going to keep interrupting or let me finish, Lam?”

“You can finish. If you can promise me this story gets better.”

“You didn’t ask me for a grand story of adventure and intrigue, love. You asked me how I got the scar.”

Lambert couldn’t bring himself to argue. He was fairly certain that each time Aiden broke out _‘love’_ his mind failed to function for the span of several seconds. The snarky remark he had thought of died in his throat before he was able to get the words out, his thoughts stalling as his mind tumbled over itself in an attempt to stop staring like a slack-jawed imbecile.

“All I had to go on was what he’d said about the blade being dull. And only an idiot lets his own blade dull. I challenged him. Figured I’d let him get a few good slashes in, and if the blade cut clean then I’d know he wasn’t lying. So he drew his knife, I drew mine, if only for the sake of appearances, and we fought. His dagger was sharp, so he got to live. The nobleman had been mistaken from the start about who really stole his family’s dagger.”

“You challenged him to a fucking _duel,_ Aiden? You don’t really expect be to believe this horseshit, do you?”

Aiden shrugged, his eyes tracking Lambert’s movements as he got up from the edge of the bed to set his subpar medical tools down on the slightly lopsided surface of a table placed between two crooked, leaning chairs.

“You can believe what you like, Lam, but it’s not a word of a lie.”

Lambert hummed, disbelieving.

“So, if the first man didn’t take it then who did?”

“The man who threw the party had girls from the Pasiflora in attendance. One of them swiped it when all the partygoers were too drunk to notice anything was amiss.”

Lambert bit the inside of his cheek to dissuade himself from telling Aiden that he ought to liven up that story with a few monsters or some good old-fashioned scandal, or _something_ the next time he told it. Not everyone was satisfied to merely listen to him speak regardless the quality of his stories. Had he not been hanging on each word simply for the fact that they were spoken by Aiden, Lambert was fairly sure he would have fallen asleep.

“That was… some story.”

“Not enough blood and lewd acts for you?”

“Not nearly enough.”

They held each other’s eyes for a moment, Aiden leaning back with his hands pressing into the feather mattress behind him and a smile curling at the edges of his mouth, and Lambert drying his hands at the washbasin, its water tinged an unappealing shade of pink. He felt exhaustion and endearment whittling down his efforts to suppress a grin of his own.

The two witchers crumbled into fits of laughter simultaneously. The way Lambert had felt earlier, the frozen sea of fear that had swallowed him, the tense ride through a nighttime field, all the anger directed inwards, the guilt for not having leapt to Aiden’s rescue in time and the guilt for believing he needed rescuing in the first place…

None of it mattered anymore.

There were only the soft shadows slanting across Aiden’s face, and the existence of some inextinguishable, impossible warmth in his eyes. They were the shade of ancient amber, older than the world. There was only the rolling tide of his laughter. It struck up sparks beneath Lambert’s skin, skittering along his nerves and igniting something he could never seem to put a name to — some feeling so convoluted by doubt and hesitation that even then, standing there and wishing that he could live in the sound of Aiden’s laughter forever, he could not have said with any certainty what it was.

All he knew was that it was the flutter of restless wings in his chest, and the sizzle of lightning crawling through his veins, and the hazy senselessness that came after a pleasant dream. And that Aiden was the cause of all those things.

His footsteps made no sound as he crossed the room, eager to give up scrubbing the smell of blood from his hands and be close to Aiden again. To remind himself that the worst had not occurred, that for all his worry and all his fear, Aiden was not dead, and he was not dead himself, and that was all that either of them could wish for.

“Lam?” Aiden flopped down onto his back, dark hair stark against the white linen sheets as his honey-gold cat eyes perused the rafters above him. The scent of dust pervaded their room, and he and Lambert both presented a strange dissonance of harsh, coppery blood and the warm, stale smell of horses.

“Yeah?” Lambert asked, shedding his collared leather gambeson and rolling onto his side next to the other witcher.

“You think we’ll ever get to relax? Don’t laugh, if you laugh you’re dead, but I always thought that if things had gone differently, if I hadn’t been brought to the Cat School, that maybe I’d have moved to Toussaint once all the toil of my younger years was over. Seen the vineyards, visited Beauclair…”

Lambert’s jaw was tight, but he couldn’t kick the sharp edge of a smile. Nothing Aiden was saying particularly warranted laughter, but the simple request that he not laugh made not laughing far more difficult than it ought to have been.

“You ever heard of a witcher growing old in peace, Aiden? We don’t get to be tired old men,” he saw Aiden’s features grow noticeably gloomy in response to that remark. “but that doesn’t mean you can’t go to Toussaint. As long as you don’t have any problems with picking up a contract or two when we’re not sightseeing.” The grin he had been fending off finally couldn’t be held back any longer. There was something unsettlingly and uncannily _canine_ about it, his incisors glinting sharply in the low light.

Aiden adored it.

He turned his body to face Lambert, propped up on his elbow with his brows slightly raised. For the life of him he couldn’t discern whether Lambert was only teasing him.

“Tell me you’re not just being an asshole, Wolf…” his tone was soft, cautious. He had just confessed a rather embarrassing desire — dreaming of Toussaint as a child wasn’t something he necessarily told just anyone.

“Hey, I think I deserve a little more credit than that. I’m capable of not being an asshole.”

“Since when?”

Lambert had been about to reply, no doubt with something biting, but Aiden didn’t even let him start. He captured Lambert’s jaw and pulled him forward into a kiss that was all clashing teeth and bitten lips, their medallions clinking together and becoming entangled. He could never think to pull away, and found himself only leaning in closer, drawn in. It was sudden and blinding and bordering on too much, but it wasn’t really. They had been locked in a strange gravitational push and pull for almost as long as they had known one another. Too many times to recall, Lambert had been certain that this would happen, hoped that it would happen, that Aiden would be the one to risk everything, because he just couldn’t bring himself to risk _anything;_ to run the slightest chance of offending Aiden to the point of damaging their relationship beyond reparation.

And so, because he had been privy to the secret affection they held for one another, there was no trace of shock in his voice when he spoke, only the unmistakable exultation that creeps its way into a person’s words where love is concerned.

“I’m gonna need you to circle back to how you think I’m incapable of not being an asshole at some point, Aiden”


End file.
